“You’ve been shot,” I said.
“I know, thank you.”
“By a gun.”
Emily leaned back, shook her head, and exhaled.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Besides the world ending in an hour?”
“Yeah, besides that.”
Emily stared straight ahead and bit her lip. I could tell that she was trying to stop herself from crying.
“What is it?” I asked.
She turned and pulled me closer, reaching her arms around my waist and hugging me hard. Tears started streaming down her cheeks.
I hugged her back. I could feel her body shaking as she struggled to hold back more tears. She was clearly in pain.
Then, Emily Connors pulled back, grabbed my face and kissed me. I could taste the salt from her tears as her lips met mine. As her lips and tongue moved across my mouth, I felt a surge of emotion move through my body.
Part of me never wanted it to end.
I’d fallen in love with Chloe, but I had no idea what had happened to her, and Emily Connors felt like part of a completely separate life.
Did Chloe even exist here?
I imagined how I’d feel if the tables were turned and Chloe was kissing somebody from her past, and I gently pulled away from Emily.
“I’m sorry. I’m in love with somebody else,” I said.
And then I stood up and explained what had happened earlier, how I’d lost Chloe in a coffee shop filled with Harolds.
Emily looked as if she’d been struck.
I watched a wave of deep sadness move across her face as she absorbed what I’d just told her. I wanted to hug her again immediately.
But I didn’t.
“Well, that’s just fucking great, K,” Emily said as she brushed the tears away from her cheeks.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“What’s the matter?” Emily repeated, and shook her head. “What’s the matter is you and I are fucking married, and I’ve spent the last four years looking for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
Emily took a few seconds to compose herself before she began to speak.
“One day,” she said, “about four years ago, you went out to try to save the world. I’ve spent the intervening years trying to pin down which dimensional stream you’d slipped into, and when, against astronomical odds, I somehow managed to find that stream—and against further astronomical odds track you down—it turns out you don’t remember anything about the amazing life we built together.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I haven’t seen you since we were kids.”
“But I’ve seen you,” Emily said. “Up until four years ago, I saw you every single morning when I woke up and every night when I went to bed.”
“That’s impossible,” I said—but I could tell by the way she spoke and the way she looked at me that everything she was saying was true.
“But this can’t be real. I mean, I’d remember the two of us getting married.”
“You would fucking think so, wouldn’t you?” Emily laughed a little as she wiped the tears from her face.
I nodded, still trying to come to terms with what Emily had just revealed.
“I lose you to dimensional drift, and your girlfriend disappears from the world via a Starbucks bathroom. We’re quite a pair.”
The violent shaking and vibrating started up again. Emily and I held on to each other and waited for it to stop.
“You used that term that the last time I saw you. Dimensional drift. Is that why I can’t remember?”
Emily nodded.
“What is it exactly?”
“Every time someone skips dimensional streams, there’s a high probability that they’ll experience some amount of drift. It’s like deep-sea divers getting the bends when they surface.”
“Decompression sickness?”
“Yeah, but for your brain. When you skip dimensions you’re displacing all of the other instances of you, shifting everything over.”
“Doesn’t that mess everything up? All these different versions of somebody suddenly living in different dimensions?”
“It’s actually mostly fine. Like I told you earlier, all of the instances share a kind of connection, and nothing is really permanently lost…it’s like we’re all drawn from the same source.”
“But if we’re able to move between dimensions, isn’t it possible that I’m not your K? That your K might still be out there somewhere?”